John Lauritsen
Not to be confused with the television news reporter in Minnesota of the same name.
John Lauritsen (1939- ) (Harvard College: AB 1963) is a retired market research analyst. He is an author and activist.[1] Lauritsen wrote for the New York Native and was an early skeptic of the theory that HIV causes AIDS.[2][3] He covered the debate over the safety of AZT.[4] He is the founder of Pagan Press.
Simon LeVay and Elisabeth Nonas call Lauritsen's The AIDS War one of "a slew of books" that lump together the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry together for purposes of blame and whose "titles are sufficiently explicit to make further perusal unnecessary."[5]
Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein argues that poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, not his wife Mary Shelley, was the real author of Frankenstein. Camille Paglia gave it a favourable review, writing that, "Lauritsen assembles an overwhelming case that Mary Shelley, as a badly educated teenager, could not possibly have written the soaring prose of "Frankenstein"...and that the so-called manuscript in her hand is simply one example of the clerical work she did for many writers as a copyist."[6]
Germaine Greer dismissed Lauritsen's thesis, writing that while he argues that Mary Shelley was not well educated enough to have written it, Frankenstein is not "a good, let alone a great" novel and that it does not deserve the attention it has been given.[7] Lauritsen countered: "Frankenstein is a radical and disturbing work, containing some of the most beautiful prose in the English language.... a profound and moving masterpiece, fully worthy of its author, Percy Bysshe Shelley."[8]
[edit] Works
- The Early Homosexual Rights Movement (1864–1935) (with David Thorstad). Times Change Press, 1974.
- Religious Roots of the Taboo on Homosexuality; a Materialist View. 1974
- Death Rush: Poppers And AIDS (with Hank Wilson). Pagan Press, 1986
- Poison by Prescription: The AZT Story (foreword by Peter Duesberg). Asklepios, 1990.
- The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering, and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex. Asklepios, 1993
- The AIDS Cult: Essays on the Gay Health Crisis (as editor, with Ian Young). Asklepios, 1997
- A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love. Pagan Press, 1998
- The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. Pagan Press, 2007
[edit] References
- ^ Know my name: a gay liberation theology By Richard Cleaver page 93
- ^ Inventing the AIDS Virus By Peter H. Duesberg
- ^ Representations of HIV and AIDS: visibility blue/s Gabriele Griffin - 2000 - 216 pages
- ^ [1] SPIN Jun 1991 page 64
- ^ LeVay, Simon & Nonas, Elisabeth. City of Friends: A Portrait of the Gay and Lesbian Community in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995. p. 244, 429
- ^ http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/camille_paglia/2007/03/14/coulter/
- ^ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/09/gender.books
- ^ http://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/GUARDIAN.HTM
